Life of Kylie Tries and Fails to Make Kylie Jenner Seem Relatable

I've never quite related to Kylie Jenner. That's something I've always attributed to our difference in age — I'm closer in number to the older Kardashians — and the fact that I've never had the stamina to keep up with Kylie's prolific social media use, which some of my younger pals have always cited as her main appeal. Having watched the first two episodes of Life of Kylie, which premieres Sunday night on E!, I've realized I don't relate to Kylie Jenner because she simply isn't relatable.

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From the outset of the series, Life of Kylie wants to prove that Kylie is just like all of us. Within the first ten seconds of the premiere, she claims the only thing that sets her apart from the average woman her age is that she can afford nice things — any car she wants, any house she wants — an assertion she makes in a voiceover paired with footage of her really fancy shoes. She goes on to explain that those material possessions aren't where she finds her true happiness.

So where does Kylie find her true happiness? If the show intends to answer that question, it doesn’t do so in its first two episodes. Not even close. It's not that Life of Kylie depicts its star as being unhappy, although it does briefly examine her ambivalence about being famous; it’s that the show stays at a surface level, not giving us enough insight into who Kylie is when she's not filming herself for the internet.

The show dances around the idea that because she has all that she does, Kylie is missing out on ordinary pleasures people take for granted. To that end, there's a full two-episode arc devoted to her taking a fan from the internet to his senior prom. But the storyline is so simplistic that it feels more like an excuse to get all dressed up than a chance for Kylie to talk about her very unconventional childhood. It devolves into, "I never got to go to prom! And now I have!" without acknowledging the fact that Kylie still hasn't had a typical prom experience. She's had the experience of crashing a prom and creating a little chaos, then dancing with her stranger-date on a balcony. That's not the same, and it's a little bizarre that the show seems content to pretend that it is, without giving us more insight into how she actually feels about missing out on so many formative experiences.

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There's plenty of fun footage of Kylie working with her glam squad, trying on dresses, and loving on her dogs (although the extended pet footage does feel a little like a "So there!" to people who accuse the Kardashian/Jenners of being irresponsible pet owners). And the show does take a few stabs at delving deeper into her personal life by exploring her relationships with her friends and showing her first session with a therapist. But Life of Kylie ignores the fact that it's not typical or relatable for Kylie's squad to be almost entirely made up of people she pays to be around her — her glam team and her assistant. That's not a dig at the authenticity of those friendships, but the circumstances under which they were formed is undeniably atypical, and yet that's completely glossed over. Kylie's relationship with her best friend Jordyn Woods is a little bit more authentic, but at one point, Kylie sets Jordyn up on a blind date, makes her wear an earpiece, and spends the duration of the date distracting Jordyn from her time with a dude who seems like kind of a catch. Not relatable.

Kylie excitedly talks about going to therapy in the show's first episode — the idea is played off as an in-the-moment revelation, rather than something that was planned in advance with producers — and goes to her first session in the second episode. (Props to her therapist for refusing to put her face on camera!) This felt like a moment for the show to go deeper into who Kylie is, but instead, she talks about how a main frustration with her life is … how she doesn't make funny Vines the way she used to as a young teenager. Legitimate? Sure. Relatable? Not really.

By staying at a surface level, Life of Kylie doesn't do much more than rehash and expand on Kylie's social media presence, and that's not particularly compelling. (It frequently goes as far as to actually just replay Snapchats on screen, which feels horrifyingly lazy at worst and just plain boring at best.) To be fair, Keeping Up with the Kardashians operates from a similar place — by the time we're watching most events unfold on the show, we've already seen them play out on social media or within the tabloids. But the difference is the family's ability to put a fresh spin on those events, whether it's through self-deprecating humor or extended emotional insight or juicy behind-the-scenes details. Life of Kylie doesn't have that extra layer of realism, and so more than anything, it feels like watching a 30-minute Snapchat, and that doesn't make for great television. This isn't a slight — Kylie is a true queen of social media. But if anything, Life of Kylie proves that Kylie's life belongs online, not on TV.

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